Edsger Dijkstra on universities

On December 8, 1996
Edsger Dijkstra addressed the graduates
of the College of Natural Sciences of the University of Texas at Austin.
This is the text of his speech.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

to begin with I would like to thank the College of Natural Sciences for
the most honouring invitation to address its newest flock of Bachelors
on this most festive day. I shall do my best.

Your past is your inalienable property, you cannot deny it, and, for
better or for worse, it will shape the rest of your lives until death
follows. In a sentimental moment, you may long for the lost innocence
and bliss of ignorance, but that ignorance is lost forever: you are now
Bachelors and you will have to carry the burden of your college education
every waking hour of the rest of your lives, nay, even in your sleep you
will be pressed to have dreams full of responsibility. A main purpose
of this commencement speech is therefore to help you to live with your
academic past: I'll try to give you some advice on how to remember your
university.

It is not only persons that are shaped by their pasts, so are institutions,
so are whole peoples. I am Dutch, and for the Dutch, a formative
experience has been how they liberated themselves several centuries ago
from the Spanish occupation. (To give you an example: their national
anthem dates from those days.) Since that war dragged for 80 years, you
might feel that the Dutch were not very efficient in liberating themselves,
but they succeeded with the tools of the time.

In 1574, the Spanish tried to conquer one of our cities, but they could not
because the town was defended too well; so they laid siege to it, trying to
starve its population, an effort in which they partly succeeded. But
water is our foe and friend, and on the 3rd of October 1574 some other
Dutchmen caused a flood by the simple device of cutting a few dikes, and the
Spanish soldiers that surrounded the city were just washed away.

Because the lifting of that siege was a turning point in our struggle for
freedom, William the Silent wanted to reward the city's population for its
bravery and endurance, and gave them the choice between two prizes: either
a full year freedom from tax paying, or the right to a University, and the
citizens chose the latter. Within a year, in 1575, the University of
Leyden, my Alma Mater, was started in a former nunnery, a building that,
thanks to the Reformation, was on the market anyhow.

I told you this story because it so neatly symbolizes the tight link
between the concept of a University and the practice of intellectual
freedom. In the dozen years that I am now here, I have learnt to appreciate
UT as a place where that link is in full vigour, and my first remark to you,
both as advice and as request, is to remember and cherish your university
as a place dedicated to the practice of intellectual freedom, where the
combination of exercising your brain and opening your mouth is encouraged.

A next characteristic of the University for which it should be cherished
and protected is its openness. Let me explain that by referring briefly to the
University's place along the whole spectrum of techniques by which one
generation transmits its insights and abilities to the next.

At the one extreme we have the techniques of the guilds which treat their
insights and abilities as valuable property, as a treasure to be kept secret.
Their technique for protecting the secrecy is by keeping the secret
knowledge unformulated; therefore, the apprentice has to join a master for
seven meagre years, during which he can absorb the craft by osmosis, so to
speak.

The university is at the other end of the spectrum: it is the professor's
task to bring the relevant insights and abilities into the public domain
by explicit formulation. It is no accident that the universities as we know
them now started to flourish after the art of book printing had been
established.

There is more to be said about that spectrum of educational techniques, but
I shall not do so now: I mentioned it to remind you why the absence of
secrecy, or, more positively formulated, openness and honesty are
characteristics that touch the heart of the academic enterprise: a
university that hides or cheats can close its doors.

I beg you to remember the essential role of academic openness when considering
academic/industrial cooperation, I urge you to remember it whenever a
government invents so-called reasons of national security or prosperity
for the prevention of free publication of the results of academic research.
Universities are not part of the nation's security organisation, they are not
the nation's research laboratories either: they are the nation's
Universities.

In passing I would like to mention that for a completely different reason
such openness is a precondition for academic survival. Just for being
different and doing things the uneducated cannot understand, the academics
are hated and feared, vide Socrates, executed in 399 BC, Archimedes, killed
in 212 BC, and, more recently, Hypatia, AD 415 barbariously murdered by a
Christian mob in Alexandria. The original Oxford Colleges were buildings
fortified in order to protect the students against the rabble, and if you
think that all that is old hat, I refer you to the recent histories of the
DDR or the People's Republic of China. These days, it is a miracle whenever
the academic world is tolerated at all, and personally I am convinced that
what tolerance there is would completely disappear were the academic
world to become secretive.

The University with its intellectual life on campus is undoubtedly a creation
of the restless mind, but it is more than its creation: it is also its
refuge. The University is unique in that on campus, being brilliant is
socially acceptable. Furthermore the fabric of the academic world is so
sturdy that it can absorb the most revolutionary ideas.

But it is not only a refuge for the restless minds, it is also a reservation
for them. It does not only protect the restless minds, it also protects the
rest of the world, where they would create havoc if they were let loose.
To put in another way, the fence around campus is essential because it
separates two worlds that otherwise would harm each other. The fence ensures
that we have relatively little direct influence on the world "out there",
but we would be foolish to complain, for our freedom to be as radical as
we like is based on the fact that, for at least the first 25 years, industry
and the world-at-large ignore our work anyhow. Currently, there seems to be a
world-wide tendency to try to lower the fence; the effort strikes me as
ill-directed.

As a very minor, but recent example: you may have heard of efforts, with the
catchword "post-tenure review", to change the contract between the university
and its faculty. We do not discuss the merits of the case, but I would like
you to see it as a symptom of the lowered fence, for one of the
underlying feelings is that on campus hiring and firing should be possible
like everywhere else, thus ignoring that a university should be as unlike
anything else as you can think of.

I think that all students should remember the University as a very special
place, but the graduates of the College of Natural Sciences should do so
most of all, because it is in that School that the hard sciences have found
a roof above their heads. It puts a heavy responsibility on those who have
gone through that school, for the others have no idea of what is going on
there, and hence naturally assume that all science is as ephemeral, as
transitory and as fashion-dependent as the rest.

It is in this respect not reassuring that so many legislatures and other
governing bodies hardly contain any true scientists. Consequently, strange
things can happen.

After WW II, the Dutch industries felt the need of a Dutch business school.
Because of its purely vocational calling, but more so because of the
perceived lack of intellectual content, none of the existing Dutch
universities wanted to have anything to do with it, and a separate business
school was founded. So far, so good, but a number of decades later, the
need was felt to raise the institute's status, and the Dutch government,
which did not know or did not care what it was doing, agreed to raise that
business school officially to the level of a university.

And in the Austin American-Statesman of November 8, we could read how that
newfangled "Nijenrode University" used its academic status: it bestowed an
Honorary Doctorate on Bill Gates, of all scholars, and I haven't figured out
yet how, as a Dutchman, I am going to atone for that.

Fortunately, encouraging things sometimes happen as well, as we could read
in a frontpage article in the International Herald Tribune of November 27,
which reported that Oxford University had just turned down a gift of $34
million because of the strings attached: the gift was intended for a new
business school, but Oxford did not want a new business school. Universities
can be Very Special Places indeed.

By the way, if you got the impression that I have my doubts about business
management as scientific discipline, you are right: it seems too fickle to be
taken seriously. In the 70s, the creed was diversification, in the 80s, the
gospel said to concentrate on your core business, and in the 90s the
world-wide credo seems to be the intellectual cleansing of the high-tech
industries.

There seems to be one thing that, independently of the height of the fence
that surrounds the campus, any graduating student can take with him into
the world outside, and that is the healthy scepticism that goes with a
well-kept immunity for hype, for slogans, for fads and for fashions. And
that is important, for the latter seems to pass by in ever increasing
frequency.

It is quite amazing --and a bit sadenning-- how gullible and desperate are
willing to expect salvation from the next gadget.

I remember how TV was promoted by the theory that a daily dose of
Shakespeare in every living room would elevate the culturally deprived
to unfathomed heights, thus curing all ills of society, etc. And what did
we get? Soap operas and quizzes.

I remember how the overhead projector was welcomed as the greatest
educational innovation since Socrates, as it allowed a much more detailed
preparation, and how the new "audio-visual aids", as they were called in
those days, would revolutionize the class room and would bring modern
teaching to each little Eskimo in his igloo. Well, of what the overhead
projector did to teaching, you are, I'm afraid, a better judge than I.

I remember how, with the advent of terminals, interactive debugging was
supposed to solve all our programming problems, and how, with the advent of
colour screens, "algorithm animation" was supposed to do the same. And
what did we get? Commercial software with a disclaimer that explicitly
states that you are a fool if you rely on what you just bought.

And now we have the multimedia/communication hype: the best bits are those
that just arrived from far away, and if you are not "on line", "on the Net",
you just don't count, you are not of this world (which is virtual anyhow...).
Apart from a change in vocabulary, it is the same hype, the same snake oil
over and over again, and you can do me a favour by not getting excited by all
the time you are supposed to save by switching to "home banking".

Recently, James H. Billington, the current Librarian of Congress, remarked
that instead of a knowledge-based democracy, we may end up with an
information-inundated democracy. I share his concern, so allow me to end
with this simple wish.

May, in spite of all distractions
generated by technology, all of
you succeed in turning
information into knowledge,
knowledge into understanding, and
understanding into wisdom.